


Eye of the Beholder

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [20]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Affection, Art, Comfort, Drawing, F/M, Love, Sketches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23659780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: Loki asks to use your old sketchbook, and there’s no stopping him after that.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 10
Kudos: 240





	Eye of the Beholder

The sketchbook had been on your shelf for ages now. When you’d first moved to New York, you’d tossed most of your belongings into boxes and just hauled them all out here. You hadn’t opened it since high school, and you probably should have just thrown it away during one of your many throw-out-everything sprees in the intervening years, but some tiny ridiculous part of you liked having it. And it didn’t take up much space, really—not as much as many of your books did—so there wasn’t a huge issue with it.

Until Loki. 

He’d taken to perusing your bookshelves for ways to entertain himself while you were stuck here together. It made you self-conscious, knowing that a celestial god was stuck reading the kinds of books that you liked instead of classic stuff, but somehow he only seemed to have good things to say about what he found. Maybe he was keeping his laughter to himself until the quarantine lifted. 

But one morning, you walked out of the bathroom to see him sitting on the floor next to one of the shelves and flipping through that sketchbook. At first, you were struck by the same gut reaction that you’d had in high school: the urge to rush over to him and rip it out of his hands. You’d been...well, a bit of a temperamental artist, and hated the people who’d just flipped open to a random page and looked at your unfinished work. After that moment passed, though, you took a breath. He wasn’t laughing, at least. He was flipping slowly through the pages, lingering over each silly piece you’d worked on, even the goofball cartoons that you’d drawn in class to amuse yourself. He reached a sketch of your childhood cat dozing on the back of the couch and the corner of his mouth turned up. 

“I was a tragic artist when I was a kid,” you said. He didn’t flinch, really, but he did look up at you rather quickly. Had you startled him? It was kind of nice, turning the tables on him like that.

“You did these?” He gestured at the book in his lap. You nodded in response as you came closer to peer over his shoulder. When you’d worked on that drawing all those years ago, you remembered how frustrated and angry you’d been because you weren’t getting the True Essence of your cat onto the page, but with your increased distance from the subject, it wasn’t bad. 

You crouched down to wrap your arms around his shoulders and kissed the back of his neck. “Good morning.”

“Morning.” He flipped back several pages, but you didn’t lift your head to look any more, much preferring to leave your face buried in his hair so you could breathe in the scent of him. “Do you have any more of these?”

“I don’t think so?” You wracked your brain, trying to remember if you’d ever carried another sketchbook. If you had, you certainly didn’t still have it. People gifted them to you often, but you never really cared about those quite as much as this one. “Sorry, I think that’s the only one that made it out here with me. Why?”

He made a thoughtful sound and shrugged lightly in your arms. “I thought I might like to try drawing a bit. You’re very good.”

You snorted and shook your head. He was being polite. You’d taken a grand total of two art classes in school, and you’d spent most of them angsting about how there were no jobs in the arts. “You can have that one. I don’t think I filled it, did I?” You finally sat up a bit then, to reach past him and flip to the back of the book. Indeed, there was a significant chunk of blank pages there. “There, see? It’s yours now. Have at it.”

Over the course of the next few weeks, he did start to draw. Mostly in the evenings, when he would normally have settled himself on the sofa with a book in his lap, he began to curl into the sketchbook. It became normal for you to happen upon a random little assortment of things from the apartment placed carefully on a side table, with Loki staring intently at it all and drawing it. It would be a lie to say you didn’t enjoy it. The way his eyebrows furrowed when he was really working on making something look right, the way he drew his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on it, always drove you to distraction. It was not often that he looked so intense and serious, and damn if it wasn’t incredibly hot. You found yourself watching his hands. His fingers curled around the pencil as he drew. They tapped against his thigh as he studied something to get the shape Just Right. He combed them through his hair when his frustration mounted and he needed to calm himself. You did your best to control yourself and let him work, but if you happened to start throwing yourself at him a little more often—distracting him with a kiss, with your hands on his body—then who could really blame you?

Your high-school self would have loved this, you often found yourself thinking. In the morning, Loki was often already awake and sitting in front of the window as he sketched the buildings below. You would bring him coffee and sit beside him, or behind him, or across the room and watch him, and things would be quiet and peaceful and lovely. It occurred to you, often, and sharply, that it was kind of a tragedy that Loki could not see himself as he drew. You came to be very familiar with the shape of his face and brows, came to memorize the shape of his hands. You weren’t much of an artist anymore, but when you weren’t longing to trace his skin with your fingertips, you were imagining being able to form those shapes with a pencil.

One morning, when you brought Loki a cup of coffee, he was not gazing out the window. Instead, his attention did not shift from the page, except for when he looked up to wish you good morning and thank you. When you stole a glance at the page in front of him, at first all you really saw was a sea of folds in fabric. That had always been your downfall: getting fabric to look realistic on the page. But of course he’d managed it perfectly. Only after you’d made that observation did you realize what else he was working on: a face. Your face. Sort of. His subject was absolutely beautiful even in this unfinished state: serene and radiant even in sleep. Your eyelashes almost seemed to flutter gently against your cheeks, the way he’d drawn them. Your lips were parted just slightly, almost enticingly even in sleep. He had certainly taken liberties with their plumpness, with the shape of your cheeks, but the picture was still pretty unmistakably you.

“Is this alright?” he asked softly. He sounded hesitant, like maybe he was afraid you’d be upset. Because of course it was upsetting to be drawn so lovingly, so beautifully. You sank into the sofa beside him and looked at him in disbelief. 

“It’s beautiful,” you said. For a moment, you felt self-conscious about calling yourself beautiful, but you really weren’t. It was his creation that was beautiful.

“ _You’re_ beautiful.” There was laughter in his voice, and he leaned in to nudge you gently. It wasn’t modesty or self-deprecation that made you shake your head and gesture towards the page; it was...truth.

“Not like that. You’re amazing.” 

“This is from memory,” he said. “This is what you look like when you’re sleeping next to me. Surely you knew that?” He actually sounded confused, like it hadn’t occurred to him that you didn’t see yourself like this. Tears sprang to your eyes as you realized that this picture was undeniable evidence of how he felt about you. Only love could soften the flaws in your face like that. You sat forward to put your mug down on the coffee table, and then wrapped your arms around his bicep so you could hug his arm to your chest. If he was confused by your actions, he didn’t press you on them. He pulled away after a moment, but only so he could put his arm around you to pull you in against his body. It was hard to know exactly what to say, but...maybe you didn’t need to say anything.

He kissed the top of your head and you clutched his shirt. You sat there like that for a long time, bathed in the warm certainty of his affection. He was perfect.


End file.
